Your cash ain't nothin' but trash

We all place a good deal of importance on money and some people seem to think it is ‘what makes the world go around’. FAIL.

Money isn’t worth the paper it is printed upon most of the time; we are merely brainwashed into thinking it has some kind of intrinsic value. The problem is, however that so many of us have undergone this lifelong brainwashing that the myth tends to almost become the reality.

However I have clear evidence that money is worth nothing or at least that it would appear to be the case judging by a few things that have happened recently.

Take for example the recent visit to Godzone by a certain inbred pervert and his Camel. Six days this privileged leech and his hideous old bat of a wife spent lapping up our hospitality. Now I have no problem with twits like this visiting our land – it would be cruel of me to deny those pathetic souls who have no life and have to make up for it by following the royals’ every step and getting a buzz from it. However I draw the line when these bludgers of the worst kind – the ones who have more money than most third tier nations but who still expect everyone else to pay for them – come and suck from our titties.

I just found out that visit has just cost Kiwis $766,000. Our Government has okayed the expenditure of more than three quarters of a million of our dollars to host these wastes of space (and our money) to holiday here for six days! That’s over $120,000 per day, or the equivalent of about three years’ earnings for the average Kiwi. That’s even more disgusting than the Libra kid himself! Clearly our tax dollars aren’t worth much if they can be frittered away that easily. What bloody benefit did this junket bring to us? The bastards never spent a penny here apart from those we had obligingly tossed into their hats.

Our rates money doesn’t count for much either. We have just learned that one of our city councillors here in Tauranga earns $74,000 per year for just 22 hours of work per week. But wait – is this one so bad? I did some sums and I think Rick Curach has had a bad rap here. What he earns as a city councillor is actually only equivalent to what any halfway good tradesman would earn – just under $65.00 per hour. Whether he is any good or not, I couldn’t say, but the pay rate ain’t that high. What the journos who tried to make a meal of this would have done better to do would have been to find out what Rick does the rest of the time. I don’t know what he does do, but if he is anything like most of these public trough feeders he will also have a successful (as in money rolling in by the railway wagon-load) business or another well paying job. It would seem nobody thought to follow that up. Or maybe they did and he doesn’t if you get my drift. In which case there was no story to start with but heck, it was probably a slow news day. They might have been better to focus on whatever the latest financial folly of the council is. There always is one.

Another recent example of how little money matters is the case of the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation fine. For those who haven’t heard about it, the massive banking corp got caught laundering money for drug cartels and terrorists. Nothing special there, you might say. After all, most international banking corporations do this routinely. However most of the time they don’t get caught. Anyway on this particular occasion the hit man who was supposed to pop the regulator must have been asleep on the job and as a result the HSBC got nicked and fined $1.8B.

To most of us this sounds like a serious amount of money, and of course it is if you count out all the noughts involved, but these things need to be put into context. That lil’ ole fine represents just 9% (roughly) of the HSBCs profit (not turnover) for the year just ended. Or to put into terms we can all understand; take a family with a combined annual income of $80,000 and assume a tax rate of 25% so they end up with $60,000 after tax. Then fine them $5400 and you get a better idea of how much this fine actually means. In the case of HSBC we can only speculate as to how much they actually made out of loaning out all that dirty money because all of the profits from that will still be coming in for some considerable time.

And finally another local example of how little money matters. The Novopay system or as it should be more accurately named; the Nonopay system, is another example of how little money matters. The Government has spent in excess of $30M on this system so that it can demoralise and ‘pauperise’ teachers by not paying their wages or holiday pay out.

You have to wonder how hard it can be to get such a simple thing as a payroll correct. Most companies have no problem at all, no matter how large or small or how many or few payroll staff they employ, so what is it with this crowd? It has to be that they aren’t a payroll developer’s arsehole – or perhaps that is exactly what they are. Is this a deliberate move by Heck Yeah and her cronies to weaken the state schools so they can point to them as dysfunctional and roll in the charter schools under the T.I.N.A principle? You would have to wonder as they seem hell-bent on stuffing this up. Appointing a dimwit sheila like Heck Yeah to the Ministerial role speaks volumes about how important they view education and the money spent/wasted on it.

We often hear that we are heading towards a cashless society. Well I’ve got news – it’s here. I’ve got none and most people I know are in the same boat (and it’s taking on a lot of water, I can tell you).

Examples like the ones above simply reinforce the futility of a society built upon the values of money and frustrating though it is to be without the stuff, I thank God I am blessed in many other ways – but a bit of cash wouldn’t hurt, big feller.